Field
This disclosure provides techniques for scene reconstruction and, in particular, scene reconstruction of complex, detailed environments from light fields.
Description of the Related Art
Scene reconstruction in the form of depth maps, 3D point clouds, or 3D meshes has become increasingly important for digitizing, visualizing, and archiving the real word, in the movie and game industry as well as in architecture, archaeology, arts, and other areas. One approach for obtaining 3D models relies on laser scanning to collect scene data, from which 3D models are constructed. However, particularly in highly detailed, meticulously designed, and cluttered environments such as movie sets, a single laser scan may suffer from a considerable amount of missing data at occlusions. Multiple laser scans may instead be employed. In practice, artists commonly spend days manually cleaning up hundreds of merged laser scans before a model generated therefrom can be used in production.
Passive, image-based stereo techniques have also been developed. However, despite decades of continuous research efforts, current stereo approaches are not well suited for challenging applications such as movie production. These approaches typically involve some form of global optimization to obtain sufficiently smooth results, and are thus not sufficiently efficient to make use of high resolution images available through current camera hardware. Further, these approaches, which often proceed from coarse to fine resolutions and rely on patch-correlation, do not produce sufficiently accurate or reliable scene reconstructions (especially at object silhouettes) needed for many applications. In addition, these approaches typically cannot handle occlusions or scene inconsistencies such as moving elements.